Fish caught by methods that can also entangle whales, dolphins, and seals will be banned from U.S. import, starting Jan. 1, 2026, according to a recent agreement.Conservation groups earlier this month made a deal with the U.S. government to stop importing seafood that doesnt meet marine mammal protection standards. U.S. fishers must also follow similar standards in domestic waters.The agreement is intended to minimize bycatch the accidental entanglement of mammals fishers werent intending to haul aboard. While many fishers have changed their techniques to avoid catching mammals, there is still work to do.Unintentional CatchesAn estimated 650,000 whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals are unintentionally caught every year. Many of those animals are tossed overboard, and either drown, or die from injuries.Entanglement is a huge threat to these animals survival, Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a news release. The United States has the power to use its enormous seafood market to help the worlds oceans, and its about time we started. The U.S. imports about $25.5 billion worth of seafood products every year. Those imports come from more than 130 nations and include shrimp, tuna, and other finfish. Around 80 percent of seafood eaten in the U.S. is imported. Time for Enforcement?Although the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited the U.S. from allowing seafood to enter the country unless exporting nations meet the same standards applied to U.S. fishers, in practice the provision was rarely enforced. In 2016, the government began the process to establish which fisheries to ban, but has delayed putting that policy into place.The deal should ensure some relief for threatened marine mammals suffering from bycatch, level the playing field for fishermen working hard to protect marine mammals, and give consumers more confidence that the seafood they consume does not needlessly kill the whales and dolphins they love, Zak Smith, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in a news release.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Center for Biological Diversity. U.S. Government Agrees to Halt Seafood Imports Tied to Deadly Bycatch of Whales, Dolphins, Other Marine MammalsBefore joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.

Theres a lot in our lives today that traces back to ancient Greece and the other cultures of the Aegean: our politics and philosophy, our art and architecture, and, apparently, our lead pollution. Thats according to a study of sediment cores from in and around the Aegean Sea, which found the earliest-known evidence of human-caused contamination from lead, and tied it to the areas inhabitants around 5,200 years ago. Published in Communications Earth & Environment, the study also identified an increase in lead contamination around 2,150 years ago. This coincided with a significant socioeconomic shift in the Aegean, as the ancient Greeks came under the control of the Romans and increased their output of silver as a result.Because lead was released during the production of silver, [] proof of increasing lead concentrations in the environment is [] an important indicator of socioeconomic change, said Andreas Koutsodendris, a study author and a researcher at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University, according to a press release. Increased Production, Increased PollutionThe Aegean fostered some of Europes earliest civilizations, fueling cultures like the Minoans, the Myceneans, and the ancient Greeks. Setting out to study how these cultures treated their Aegean environments in turn, a team of researchers sampled a series of sediment cores from the seas coasts and seafloor.Analyzing 14 separate sediment cores (several taken from aboard the METEOR and AEGAEO research vessels), the team found that humans had caused lead contamination a lot earlier than previously thought approximately 1,200 years earlier, around 5,200 years ago. Their analysis also revealed that human-caused concentrations of lead surged in the Aegean around 2,150 years ago.The changes coincide with the conquest of Hellenistic Greece by the Romans, who subsequently claimed for themselves the regions wealth of resources, said Joseph Maran, a study author and an archaeologist at Heidelberg University, in the release.Indeed, the Greeks increased their production of silver, and thus their pollution of their environment, after they fell to the Romans in 146 B.C.E., a change that likely caused the increased traces of lead in the sediments of the Aegean coast and seafloor.Lead, Pollen, and Land The team says that the earlier traces of human-caused contamination were found in coastal sediments. In fact, the earliest evidence came from a core from a peat bog. But the later traces were found in seafloor sediments, too, with the surge some 2,150 years ago representing the earliest evidence of human-caused contamination in the ocean.Preserving traces of pollen alongside traces of lead, the cores even allowed researchers to track Aegean land management over time, including the removal of forests and the clearing of agricultural fields that occurred in the area after Roman conquest.Ultimately, their results reveal how the world of the Aegean was transformed socially, economically, and environmentally from 5,200 years ago to 2,150 years ago. The combined data on lead contamination and vegetation development show when the transition from agricultural to monetary societies took place and how that impacted the environment, said Jrg Pross, a study author and a professor at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University, in the release.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Communications Earth & Environment. Societal Changes in Ancient Greece Impacted Terrestrial and Marine EnvironmentsBritannica. Aegean CivilizationsBritannica. Greeks, Romans, & BarbariansSam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Nature, Published online: 29 January 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08495-6Samples from the asteroid (101955) Bennu, returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission, include sodium-bearing phosphates and sodium-rich carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides formed during evaporation of a late-stage brine.

Nature, Published online: 29 January 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08498-3Caspase recruitment domains (CARDs) are present in defence systems that protect bacteria against phage, where the bacterial CARD domain is essential for protease-mediated activation of bacterial gasdermins that promote cell death.

New Presidential administrations almost always mean a new agenda for the Federal Communications Commission. As a prime example of this, the new FCC Chair Brendan Carr has struck down a Biden-era proposal that would have limited landlords' ability to make tenants accept mandatory internet service through a single bulk provider. Since the proposal has been shot down, there's nothing keeping building owners from forcing their tenants to pay for internet service they neither want nor need.As reported by Ars Technica, Carr framed his decision as a win for consumers and claimed that the previous proposal would have increased increased internet costs for tenants. He also condemned the proposal as "regulatory overreach" and promised to undo more of the FCC's prior agenda.However, the now-defunct proposal was not a ban on landlords' ability to offer bulk internet services; it simply gave tenants the ability to refuse the service. That was opposed by housing industry lobby groups, who in turn praised Carr's decision for allowing renters "to reap the benefits of bulk billing." Cable industry lobbyists--including representatives of Comcast, Charter, and Cox--were also in favor of Carr's action.Continue Reading at GameSpot

The long-running tabletop mech game BattleTech has spawned numerous video games, including MechWarrior, MechAssault, and 2018's BattleTech, but if you've ever wanted to get into the board game that started it all, now is the perfect time. The game recently celebrated its 40th birthday with a new 40th Anniversary Edition of the core box, and various new expansions have launched in the months since, including new mech minis, source books, and more. The latest new releases include the BattleTech: Mercenaries expansion and a bunch of standalone mech and vehicle minis to add to your tabletop sessions. BattleTech Mercenaries $75 The BattleTech: Mercenaries box includes eight BattleTech miniatures and four vehicle miniatures, plus a gameplay primer, rulebook, punch-out tokens, maps, pilot cards, Battlefield Support cards, and a premade campaign to play through. Note that this expansion requires the BattleTech: Game of Armored Combat 40th Anniversary Edition to play. See at Amazon Along with the new Mercenaries box, you can also expand your BattleTech collection with a batch of new miniatures. There are five packs available now, each of which includes multiple mech or vehicle minis and associated pilot cards, such as the Inner Sphere Tecon Lance with Firestarter, Ostscout, Spector, and Javelin mechs, or the Clan Cavalry Star set with the Black Python, Shadow Hawk, Griffin, Jenner, and Locust mechs. Those sets are available now, while the Inner Sphere Security Lance box with Marauder, Archer, Atlas, and Grasshopper mechs is available to preorder for $30 ahead of its February 5 release date. Check out all the new and upcoming BattleTech miniatures in the list below.New BattleTech mech and vehicle miniaturesBattleTech: Battlefield Support - Assault & Cavalry Lances vehicle miniatures set -- $40BattleTech: Battlefield Support - Recon & Hunter Lances vehicle miniatures set -- $40BattleTech: Battlefield Support - Rifle & Command Lances vehicle miniatures set -- $40BattleTech: Clan Cavalry Star mech miniatures set -- $35BattleTech: Inner Sphere Recon Lance mech minatures set -- $30BattleTech: Inner Sphere Security Lance mech miniatures set -- $30 | Preorder, releases February 5 BattleTech 40th Anniversary Edition $58.19 See at Amazon Continue Reading at GameSpot

Lugia recently received a unique makeover, with a Pokemon fan merging its appearance with Luigi from the Super Mario franchise. While this character combination might not immediately come to mind for many, the Pokemon fan artist revealed the Luigi-themed makeover fit the creature surprisingly well.

One of Stardew Valley's core mechanics is building relationships with NPCs. From romantic connections to neighborly bonds, the player can grow close to almost everyone in town and go from being an outsider to a real member of the community. The easiest way to win villagers' hearts is through generosity. Giving gifts, running errands posted on the bulletin board, and simply talking to people will raise their affection.

DeepSeek-R1 is an open model with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities. Instead of offering direct responses, reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 perform multiple inference passes over a query, conducting chain-of-thought, consensus and search methods to generate the best answer.Performing this sequence of inference passes using reason to arrive at the best answer is known as test-time scaling. DeepSeek-R1 is a perfect example of this scaling law, demonstrating why accelerated computing is critical for the demands of agentic AI inference.As models are allowed to iteratively think through the problem, they create more output tokens and longer generation cycles, so model quality continues to scale. Significant test-time compute is critical to enable both real-time inference and higher-quality responses from reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, requiring larger inference deployments.R1 delivers leading accuracy for tasks demanding logical inference, reasoning, math, coding and language understanding while also delivering high inference efficiency.To help developers securely experiment with these capabilities and build their own specialized agents, the 671-billion-parameter DeepSeek-R1 model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice preview on build.nvidia.com. The DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservice can deliver up to 3,872 tokens per second on a single NVIDIA HGX H200 system.Developers can test and experiment with the application programming interface (API), which is expected to be available soon as a downloadable NIM microservice, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.The DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservice simplifies deployments with support for industry-standard APIs. Enterprises can maximize security and data privacy by running the NIM microservice on their preferred accelerated computing infrastructure. Using NVIDIA AI Foundry with NVIDIA NeMo software, enterprises will also be able to create customized DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservices for specialized AI agents.DeepSeek-R1 a Perfect Example of Test-Time ScalingDeepSeek-R1 is a large mixture-of-experts (MoE) model. It incorporates an impressive 671 billion parameters 10x more than many other popular open-source LLMs supporting a large input context length of 128,000 tokens. The model also uses an extreme number of experts per layer. Each layer of R1 has 256 experts, with each token routed to eight separate experts in parallel for evaluation.Delivering real-time answers for R1 requires many GPUs with high compute performance, connected with high-bandwidth and low-latency communication to route prompt tokens to all the experts for inference. Combined with the software optimizations available in the NVIDIA NIM microservice, a single server with eight H200 GPUs connected using NVLink and NVLink Switch can run the full, 671-billion-parameter DeepSeek-R1 model at up to 3,872 tokens per second. This throughput is made possible by using the NVIDIA Hopper architectures FP8 Transformer Engine at every layer and the 900 GB/s of NVLink bandwidth for MoE expert communication.Getting every floating point operation per second (FLOPS) of performance out of a GPU is critical for real-time inference. The next-generation NVIDIA Blackwell architecture will give test-time scaling on reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 a giant boost with fifth-generation Tensor Cores that can deliver up to 20 petaflops of peak FP4 compute performance and a 72-GPU NVLink domain specifically optimized for inference.Get Started Now With the DeepSeek-R1 NIM MicroserviceDevelopers can experience the DeepSeek-R1 NIM microservice, now available on build.nvidia.com. Watch how it works:With NVIDIA NIM, enterprises can deploy DeepSeek-R1 with ease and ensure they get the high efficiency needed for agentic AI systems.See notice regarding software product information.